I think long COVID has impacted more Americans than we realize. Everyone out there suffering from diminished capacities thinking that the fascist sex-pest goomba is somehow more reliable than the nice black lady. I dunno about you guys, but I’ve just been seeing a whole lot of mistakes lately. On television, in News, in articles, just… everywhere.
And while a lot of it is probably people quiet quitting and not giving a fuck, I think a lot more people are suffering from the extended brain fog of long COVID than we think, and it’s affecting everything around us. Unfortunately, that includes voting practices in elections.
mine isn’t a brain fog but COVID and a trump presidency made me not trust humans at all.
i no longer trust friends, family, neighbors, governments, leaders, police, doctors, businesses. none of them maintained trust during the Trump presidency and the pandemic.
but i still vote straight ticket democrat. because their platform doesn’t include NAZI-ism
The NYTimes wrote it out for me:
The playbook for transforming a democracy into a soft autocracy was clear: Win power with a populist message against elites. Redraw parliamentary districts. Change voting laws. Harass civil society. Pack courts with judges willing to support power grabs. Enrich cronies through corruption. Buy up newspapers and television stations and turn them into right-wing propaganda. Use social media to energize supporters. Wrap it up in an Us versus Them message: Us, the “real” Russians or Hungarians or Americans, against a rotating cast of Them: the migrants, the Muslims, the liberals, the gays, George Soros and on and on.
I think a big part of this might be the Democrats not wanting to take the populist pro-worker anti-rich stances due to campaign donations.
Because populism is always dangerous. If Democrats go all in on populism, I will stop voting. I am not going to play this game where we just volley lies back and forth like a tennis ball until someone trips and the other person scores a point.
I will always support sober technocracy. If American politics actually turns into populist tennis then all is lost.
This is almost certainly a prime factor in everything now. And we’ll never know, because everybody will look at you like you’re a fucking terrorist if you so much as point out that covid never stopped being rampant.
Most definitely. Whenever I mentioned that my short term memory got bad after I had covid the first time (before vaccines), many people chimed in and agreed that they have it too.
It got better after about 18 months.
The point I’m trying to make is, that people usually keep it for themselves unless they have someone that takes away the shame.
Eh, it’s always been a convenient myth for the republican party that Americans genuinely seem to believe they are better on “macro” even though it’s always been probably the reverse (that democrat politicians have to clean up the mess that lower taxes and deregulation generate). For at least 40 years. In some states the reverse is true, like mass/NJ/ny voting blue pres while having a pretty regular flip flop in the governor’s seat and then solidly blue house/senate.
Similarly Dems always have a worse than average spin on wars, the comment being “republicans want a massive military that does nothing, Dems want a tiny military that goes everywhere” when in reality our foreign policy doesn’t really change (except Biden actually pulled out of Afghanistan).
I think a lot of this is that Republicans used to follow what used to be the recommendations of the most prominent main-stream economists. We can judge that as foolish in hindsight, but, “let the economics experts handle the economy” is a fairly reasonable policy.
2 big things changed. Republicans push more and more policies that economists consider dumb and economists have updated their models and recommendations based on new research. Even those old free market economists were not fans of tariffs and trade wars. It’s pretty hard to find an actual economist (like with a PhD from a respected econ school) who thinks wanton deregulation is a good idea.
At the same time, Democrats still hold on to a few ideas that economists all agree are dumb. There’s tons of evidence that things like rent control and home purchase credits make housing problems worse.
Democrats tend to support better economic policies than Republicans do but they support enough bad ones that it’s easy for Republicans to argue that the old status quo is correct.
